General Accounting

General David Petraeus

Last December, the Army released a document entitled “Counterinsurgency,” an updated field manual designed to guide United States forces to victory in guerrilla wars. “Legitimacy Is the Main Objective” is one heading above its thematic advice. To defeat a resistance force in irregular war, the manual observes, it is essential to recognize “that political factors have primacy” and may account for as much as four-fifths of the struggle—an insight ascribed, a little showily, to a strategist on Mao Zedong’s central committee.

The general who oversaw the field manual’s rewriting, David H. Petraeus, was dispatched to Iraq upon its completion in order to apply its principles to one of the less credible wars in American history. Since then, Petraeus, perhaps the most scholarly American officer ever to wear four stars, has been preoccupied by a political imperative—justifying the “surge” of thirty thousand additional troops who accompanied him to Baghdad. The General, a fitness compulsive who excels at pushups, has given much time to hosting congressional delegations and providing journalists with interviews, which he often conducts amid the stirring atmospherics of his airborne command helicopter. This summer, Petraeus crafted a campaign to publicize signs of progress he claimed to see in Iraq, and it became clear that he regarded America’s restive democracy as a theatre in his counterinsurgency operations.

By the time he returned to Washington last week to deliver a flinty and unrevealing report on the war, the General’s achievements on the Iraqi front appeared, at best, to amount to a muddle, but his success at forestalling war skeptics in Congress looked more impressive. Petraeus has arguably made himself more important to the future of Iraq’s war than has the lame-duck President he serves—a situation that President Bush, understandably, seems pleased about. The General was tense and uncharismatic during his congressional testimony, yet he exuded integrity; after his second day at the witness table, the Times felt compelled to publish a graphic annotating his medals.

Petraeus is not Bush’s lackey; his views of the Iraq war overlap with the President’s, but they arise from very different antecedents. In 1987, Petraeus completed a three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-page doctoral dissertation at Princeton entitled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam,” a lucid and subtle review of civil-military relations in the United States from the Korean War until the mid-nineteen-eighties. In his conclusion, Petraeus argued against the Army doctrine that had been reaffirmed in reaction to the Vietnam War—an “all or nothing” approach, as he labelled it, which held that the United States should enter wars only with overwhelming force and with clear, achievable objectives that would enjoy public support. This was later called the Powell Doctrine, for General Colin Powell, its practitioner until he endorsed the inadequately manned invasion of Iraq four and a half years ago.

Petraeus saw the doctrine as potentially unrealistic because small, nasty wars—where there would be no “clear-cut distinction between peace and war”—seemed to him the coming trend. He quoted approvingly former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger’s belief that the United States should not limit itself to fighting only “popular, winnable wars.” To prepare for such a future, Petraeus argued for rebuilding America’s counterinsurgency capabilities.

He observed that American public opinion often wavers during a protracted conflict, and he quoted General George C. Marshall’s admonition that “a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War”; his tone betrayed a hint of professional irritation at weak-kneed tendencies among the people. Still, Petraeus could see that not all counterinsurgencies are easily won, no matter the public’s fortitude. He cited in particular the Soviet Union’s brutal struggles in Afghanistan:

After all, if a country with relatively few public opinion concerns or moral compunctions about its tactics cannot beat a bunch of ill-equipped Afghan tribesmen, what does that say about the ability of the United States —with its domestic constraints, statutory limitations, moral inhibitions, and zealous investigative reporters—to carry out a successful action against a guerrilla force?

Academic questions of that kind require field work to answer; two decades later, Petraeus has his controlled experiment, and his research is remarkably well funded. It is far from clear, however, whether he is asking all the right questions.

If General Petraeus privately believes President Bush’s facile rhetoric about the pursuit of “victory” in Iraq, it would be a departure from the thinking evident in his dissertation and counterinsurgency field manual. More likely, the General sees himself as scrapping toward a moderately intolerable mess in Iraq, as an alternative to utter cataclysm. He has compared his goals to the British campaign in Northern Ireland, which produced “a level of violence that actually the Northern Ireland citizens learned to live with.” Britain’s democracy, however, saw crucial interests in its historical ties to Northern Ireland. The American public has made plain that it sees no comparable interest in the interminable pursuit of a less bad Iraq.

Petraeus’s recent strategy of playing for time through the application of spin politics is straining the health and vitality of the Army to which he has devoted his life. It is also deepening mistrust between civilian politicians and the military. Surely, for example, the General is conscious of the partisan Republican campaign to promote him as “Bush’s Grant,” and is aware of the cause: the Party expects to lose the next Presidential election because of the war, but Petraeus offers hope, however faint, that a Republican nominee might find something in Iraq to embrace. Petraeus’s ambition is legendary; his pride and his professional devotion to counterinsurgency have now become entangled in an exploitive electoral machine.

Petraeus also apparently clings to the belief that Iraq’s sectarian leaders might reconcile if American forces stay the course. This opinion, shared by many in the Bush Administration, has encouraged yet another generation of unconvincing strategic plans that assume that a unified Iraq governed from Baghdad is attainable and that thousands of American troops might help patrol the capital’s streets for years. A more plausible strategy, devoted to managing as successfully as possible the informal sectarian partition of Iraq which is already well under way, has again been postponed, along with substantial troop reductions.

American majorities repudiated the Vietnam War and have repudiated the invasion of Iraq. They did not lack guts then or now; they saw past the false promises and manipulations of their leaders, and called time. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden appear to share the belief that the United States is chronically afflicted with a cut-and-run syndrome, but they are both wrong: the most striking aspect of American democracy during the catastrophe in Iraq today is not the public’s inconstancy but, rather, its capacity to absorb thousands of casualties on behalf of a war that is widely understood as a mistake and has no foreseeable end. ♦

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.